misogyny

I just wrote this indignant letter to the editors of New Republic. We’ll see if they publish it:

Dear Editors of New Republic,

Thank you for drawing attention to the pervasive sexism and abuse of power at universities and colleges in the article, “A Professor is Kind of Like a Priest.” I applaud Irene Hsu and Rachel Stone for noting that Seo-Young Chu’s, Jane Penner’s and my stories are neither “single instances of faculty sexual abuse,” but rather part of a “larger culture of silence and complicity, which has made for a dangerous, destructive, and exclusionary educational environment.” I have a few complaints about the way the article was edited.

First, a correction. The copy reads, “After the two went out to dinner one night, Moretti returned with Latta to her apartment.” This is inaccurate. I have no memory of having dinner with Franco Moretti, and cannot remember why he came to my Oakland apartment.

Second, your article omits one of the most egregious elements of my story, which I told to Hsu and Stone. This is the university’s utter indifference and cover-up of my complaint at the hands of Frances Ferguson, then the Title IX officer at Berkeley. Ferguson covered up for Moretti by actively discouraging me from making a formal complaint, which she described as a harrowing experience likely to induce as much trauma as I had already suffered. Ferguson was a member of the same department and knew Moretti well enough to recognize whom I was describing when I went to speak to her, yet she commanded, “Don’t tell his name.” Ferguson’s icy demeanor and departmental association with the man who raped me twice, plus the fact that she was then the only university officer to whom I could go with my complaint at the time, made it clear to me that I would receive neither sympathy nor support from the UC Berkeley. She was the cold and indifferent face of the institution. Ferguson’s cover-up and Moretti’s threat that, if I were to file formal charges against him, the wife of another colleague in the English department, a powerful lawyer, would defend him and that he would ruin my career, silenced me for many years.

Third, your article fails to indicate that this same Frances Ferguson, Walter Benn Michael’s wife, actively sought to recruit Moretti for a position at Johns Hopkins University, where she was also teaching in the 1990s. It was only graduate student outcry after Moretti molested a female graduate student during his interview that foiled Ferguson’s wish to bring him to campus.

Finally, the editor of the article insisted that its authors insult me by asking whether I believed that Franco Moretti raped me both times that I remember having unwanted sexual contact with him. I emphatically responded, “yes.” The article fails to mention this second rape, and therefore also neglects to tell the whole story.

I will publish this letter publicly on Facebook, just in case you are too timid to publish it as an editorial in New Republic, where it belongs.

Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.

I HAVE been a practicing Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and outdated attitudes and practices – as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.

I understand, however, why many political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy – and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: “The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable.”

We are calling on all leaders to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices, no matter how ingrained, which justify discrimination against women. We ask, in particular, that leaders of all religions have the courage to acknowledge and emphasize the positive messages of dignity and equality that all the world’s major faiths share.

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place – and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence – than eternal truths. Similar biblical excerpts could be found to support the approval of slavery and the timid acquiescence to oppressive rulers.

I am also familiar with vivid descriptions in the same Scriptures in which women are revered as pre-eminent leaders. During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn’t until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.

The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions – all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

I continue to worry about Laxmi. We’ve started math classes at the women’s center and she appears to have trouble even with rudimentary arithmetic. This may have something to do with her unfamiliarity with western-style numerals, but I fear that the problem is deeper. It would seem that she has had very little schooling of any kind. This concerns me because at 50 she is old by Nepali standards and will certainly be discriminated against as she looks for a job. I brought her to the attention of the director of VSN, who wanted to do something for her. I had hoped that we would be able to give her a temporary bed at the Women’s Center and a job as a house cleaner and caretaker. But Shreezanna, whom Tej has wisely made manager of the center, did not want to bring her in for fear that she would never leave.

Tej and Shreezanna offered to help her to learn a new skill so that she could go into business for herself. She could take sewing lessons at the center and work as a seamstress. Or she could borrow some money in order to set up a small shop selling vegetables. Neither of these options particularly appeal to her, not because she is lazy but rather because she knows that she lacks the bookkeeping, personality and time-management skills to go into business for herself.

Twenty-three years ago her husband abandoned her after seven months of marriage for another woman. She continued to live with her husband’s family for a few years, but they pushed her out.

Nepal still operates under the medieval cultural assumption that a woman who has had sex but is not living with her husband is little more than a whore. Therefore, traditional Nepalis regard a jilted or divorced woman as unclean, worthless, and untouchable. The double standard permits men to sleep with whomever they please, as often as they please, without losing any status. The fundamental assumption underlying this hypocrisy is that women belong to men as a kind of chattel and constitute lesser human beings. Men enjoy greater political, economical, and social privileges than women do solely because they are not female. What is the most pernicious effect of this misogynist worldview? The damage it does to women’s self-esteem. A woman who has been treated as a lesser being, a servant, a breeder, or a status symbol all of her life generally regards herself in those terms, even if she still has the sense in some forgotten region of her body and mind, that she is worthy, beautiful, and that she has the same right to a dignity and respect as any other person.

Laxmi has a strong sense of her own dignity but few options. After her in-laws excluded her, she went to live with her brother. He was kind to her but his wife looked down on her as a ruined woman and abused her. Laxmi held out for nine or ten years, and then went to live with a niece. I do not know why she did not stay with her niece’s family. Laxmi then went to live with her sister in Pepsi-Cola. Years passed, and the sister and her family decided to move back to their village in Solu Khumbu, the region around Sagarmatha, which westerners call Mt. Everest. Laxmi did not want to join them because the villages would treat her roughly and rudely on account of her status.

She came to the attention of Sugandha, who wanted to help her but did not have much to offer. She has been working long hours in his house for two meals a day and 500 rupees (about $8) per month. He also convinced his sister, , but this situation became unbearable for one or both and ended soon. Laxmi is now living with a friend. Sugandha intended to assist Laxmi for only a short time, to give her shelter and food until she found a way to support herself.

I could have pushed Tej and Shreezanna harder and even, perhaps, have forced them to give Laxmi a room at the women’s center. My donation, after all, made it possible for VSN to rent the flat, and it still has an unused room. What difference does it make if she comes and never leaves? Is the women’s center not supposed to help women just like Laxmi, women who have no husband, no family, no source of support, no or few skills, and no money? Yes. It is. But the women’s center also needs to keep on going after I am gone.

Here is my still-evolving philosophy: It is wrong to force well-intentioned yet potentially unrealistic and inappropriate Western attitudes and ways of doing things onto a culture that I still imperfectly understand. I believe that all human beings have the right to flourish and to meaningful work and to live their lives with dignity. But I don’t know the best way for Nepali people to flourish with meaning and dignity. I am a visitor here and aim to tread lightly. Even if I did try to impose my way of doing things, the Nepalis would only go along with it for a short time and then return to what makes sense to them, what they know works. So I think the thing to do is to aid people who are already working to improve the lives of their countryfolk in ways that make sense to me

I think it can be very hard to know whom to trust, but I trust Tej and Shreesannah. I will defer to them in most cases. But I will also do what I can to make the lives of the people whom they are helping happier, healthier, and more dignified. I want to enable and empower women and children to make their own decisions about their lives, to have a measure of freedom that they would probably not have without VSN.

So, what will happen to Laxmi? I don’t know. I was not able to raise very much money on her behalf. What I received went to her. People tend to prefer to help children and young people. There is no social security system in place in Nepal. She may end up going to her sister and her village, where she will be excluded from the hearth, the family circle, the fellowship that sustains emotional well-being and good humor. I don’t know for sure that this will happen to her. I only know what people tell me, and that is this: a woman who has been abandoned by her husband leads a very terrible and hard life. I don’t think Tej will let her fall into the streets, but I also do not know what he can or will do for her. She cannot depend on him or on me or anyone else to take care of her. I don’t know enough about her story to do it, or her, credit.

When they assessed her case, British immigration officials knew that Katya, a vulnerable 18-year-old from Moldova, had been trafficked and forced into prostitution, but ruled that she would face no real danger if she was sent back.

Days after her removal from the UK, her traffickers tracked her down to the Moldovan village where she had grown up. She was gang-raped, strung up by a rope from a tree, and forced to dig her own grave. One of her front teeth was pulled out with a pair of pliers. Shortly afterwards she was re-trafficked, first to Israel and later back to the UK.

There is no question that Katya is a victim of heinous violence and crime. But the reporting of her story in the passive voice, re-victimizes her by keeping the focus on what people did to her, as opposed on who kidnapped, raped, sold, prostituted, and tortured her. This representation in language mirrors the attitude that society and the judicial system has towards women, so often the objects of hideous violence, and men, so often the perpetrators of hideous violence against women. The media–both the producers and the consumers of newspapers, blogs, documentaries, television programs, and tweets–greedily gobbles up stories about terrible things done women, but generally fails to follow up on, name, or draw attention to the people who do these things. When was the last time you read or heard a news story about a trafficker or rapist brought to justice?

Katya’s story–what happened as well as the way that it is narrated–mirrors a serious problem in modern society. That problem is masculinism, the arbitrary set of beliefs and practices that privilege masculine beings over feminine beings. The judicial system, the police, and the media actually do very little to bring attention and punishment to the people who kidnap, sell, and torture women, because they don’t really consider these crimes to be very serious. And why? Because the victims of these crimes are women, and women–especially poor women–don’t count as subjects, as self-moving, autonomous persons endowed with the same degree of reason and dignity as men. They tolerate the enslavement of persons whom they do not believe to be as human as they are. People are eager to read the lurid and grisly details of crimes committed against women, but not eager to take the steps necessary to stop it.

As Katya herself has asked,

“Just look around you – see how many girls there are like me. They are coming all the time. I see them every day – in tube stations, all made up, early in the morning. Maybe for you it is difficult to see them, but I see them,” said Katya (not her real name), in an interview in her solicitor’s office. “I think the police should work better to stop this. Why don’t you shut down saunas and brothels? Then there would be no prostitutes, no pimps.”

Katya is now 26. She was 14 when Traffickers kidnapped her from her village and forced her to work as a prostitute in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and the UK. She earned no money, only punishment and humiliation for her labor. When the police raided the London brothel where her slavers forced her to work, they arrested Katya. She was afraid to tell them how she came to be there, because the Kosovan Albanian man who sold her told her that he would punish her family is she said anything. Although they knew that people had trafficked her, the police allowed her enslaver to visit her nine times in jail, where he intimidated her further. Although immigration officials knew that a gang kidnapped her in her Moldovan village, they sent her back to it, insisting that she would not be in danger there. Her slavers found her a few days after she arrived. Here is what they did to her:

“They took me to a forest and I was beaten and raped. Then they made a noose out of rope and told me to dig my own grave as I was going to be killed,” Katya’s court statement reads. “They tied the noose around my neck and let me hang before cutting the branch off the tree. I really believed I was going to die. They then drove me to a house where many men were staying. They were all very drunk and took turns to rape me. When I tried to resist, one man physically restrained me and pulled my front tooth out using pliers.”

Her torturers then sold her in Tel Aviv, where she was forced to be a prostitute. She escaped. They found her again and sold her to a brothel in the UK, where her pimps got £150 (approximately $320) an hour for her labor, and she got nothing. In 2007 immigration officials detained her again, and again considered sending her to Moldova. Both times that UK police and immigration officials got hold of her, they treated her as an illegal resident instead of as the victim of sexist criminal activity. It seems there is “friction” between politicos who are more interested in ridding the country of unwanted foreigners than stopping crimes against women, and the few members of the police force who want to shut down trafficking.

Paul Holmes, the now retired former head of the Metropolitan police’s vice unit, CO14, said in a pre-trial statement that there was already much evidence by 2003 that should have led immigration officials to identify her as a trafficking victim.

…

“Our doubt about the effectiveness of prompt removal was exacerbated by the fact that our intelligence-gathering and operational activities had highlighted the fact that in some cases, victims that had been removed were subjected to retrafficking and were being discovered for a second time in London brothels or elsewhere within weeks of their original removal,” he said.

The Poppy Project, which “provides accommodation and support to women who have been trafficked into prostitution or domestic servitude,” warns that 21% of the women who came to the charity seeking help had already been sent home and retrafficked at least once. It also reports that it has noted an increase is the number of trafficked women and who are in the process of being removed. In its unfathomable wisdom, the UK government has just defunded this project. All the expertise that the Poppy Project staff have built up over the years, and all the care it has provided, will now disappear.

The UK government, in its deficit-decreasing rage, makes its priorities clear. It doesn’t care about trafficked women because they’re just women, after all. Their solution to the trafficking problem? Deport the victims, and let the traffickers continue to operate.

Katya’s traffickers have not been arrested. The brothels in London are still open.

The problem is not unique to the UK or Europe. Thousands of vicious traffickers regularly enslave and abuse girls and women in the United States. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) reports that traffickers prey upon at least 100,000 children in the US every year. They find victims at the most unlikely places, like the Superbowl. The Human Trafficking Prevention Act of 2000 and many acts that have followed it, has focused almost entirely on foreigners and U.S. children continue to be charged for prostitution. Representative Carolyn Maloney introduced the Domestic Sex Trafficking Bill in June 2010, but Congress abandoned this measure when the Tea-Partiers and zealous anti-immigration GOPers came into power in 2011.

Refusing to take action against sex trafficking is only one more way that the GOP carries out its War On Women and perpetuates a culture-wide masculinism that assumes that women are less entitled to rights, dignity, and autonomy than men.

The Mis-representation of Women in the Media, Or, Insidious Violence Against Human Beings Gendered Feminine is the subject of today’s rant, and it is prompted by Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s documentary, Miss Representation.

We’ve seen many of these images before, of course, but not while thinking about them as Newsome allows us to. She skillfully juxaposes the pornographic male gaze with a more honest look at actual women and girls. Seeing these images out of context, away from the narratives that lull us to sleep, or encourage us to buy products, or vote the way particular corporate interests direct us to think about ourselves as women or men, allows us to understand how they damage us.

Distorted and insulting portraits of women as sex objects for men to use, deride, revile, and torment with abandon express the fantasies of adolescent porn addicts. Sut Jhally makes a similar point in his compelling Dreamsworlds 3: Sex and Power in Music Video. These phantasms of the misogynist mind do real harm because they seep into the collective unconscious and register there as accurate, acceptable, even laudable. That is why we see eleven year-olds vamping up in sexy outfits and heavy makeup and housewives taking up pole-dancing, or imagining that such activities are appropriate and authentic means of self-expression, even artistry, and that dressing and behaving like slaves will garner them genuine love, affection, companionship.

These perverted images do not directly rape women, but they do a symbolic violence that is as devastating and long-lasting as rape, and this symbolic violence, this grotesque representation of women as sex-starved sluts desperate for male attention, or as “bitches” or “dykes” when they refuse to defer to men and stand up for themselves, leads to actual, physical violence. This symbolic violence encourages men to rape and to brutalize women, and then trivializes these horrific crimes.

Media symbols of degraded femininity do real violence not only because they broadcast a particularly narrow and misogynist message, but also because they reinforce the underlying patriarchal structure of our society. They reiterate the male/female dichotomies that organize our culture and guide the way that we learn to understand ourselves narrowly as masculine or feminine, rational or irrational, subject or object, light or dark, good or bad.

As my favorite Spinster Aunt at I Blame the Patriarchy notes, femininity is not inherent or natural, but rather a way of being that is acquired, developed, within a patriarchal and heterosexist culture:

That’s right. Femininity is not a natural expression of femaleness. It is not an hereditary, hormone-based fascination for fashion, submissiveness, mani-peddies, baby-soft skin, or catfighting. It is not a fun-loving lifestyle choice. Femininity is a rigid system of behaviors imposed on us by the Global Accords Governing the Fair Use of Women as a means to control, subjugate, and marginalize us, entirely at our expense, for the benefit of the male-controlled megatheocorporatocracy.

Some people believe that

the practice of femininity is but one facet of an exciting smorgasbord…of lifestyle choices available to today’s busy autonomous gal-on-the-go. They feel that “choosing” feminine conduct is an act of feminist rebellion, on the grounds that the choicing is entirely the chooser’s own personal idea. They aver that femininity can be an expression of a woman’s personal personality, and that it is “fun.” It is irrelevant, apparently, that femininity just happens to align precisely with the pornified desires, yucky fetishes, and vulgar business interests of the entire dudely culture of domination.

…It’s so much easier to go with the flow and comfy up with the familiar old gender stereotypes than it is to come to grips with the fact that our woman-hating world order enforces femininity with a rigorous system of hollow, joyless rewards and uncompromising, murderous punishments, and that the enforcement of feminine behavior is a global humanitarian crisis.

Twisty has it right. The enforcement of feminine behavior–feminine as defined by the media who pander to adolescent porn-addled male fantasies, which the media reinforces and sustains in order to perpetuate itself–is a global humanitarian crisis because women constitute more than 50 per cent of the global population and women across the world have been under siege for thousands of years, since patriarchy was invented.

Feel like watching another video? Check out this great ad by the Dove Self-Esteem fund:

Feel better now? No? The director is sending an message, but also shows us how the media assaults us in order to manipulate us! It blasts away at us every day all the time. Actual men assault actual women every day, all the time, too. Officially estimated, men rape women and girls every 15 seconds in this country, and 1 in 4 women has been or will be sexually violated in her lifetime. But when you consider the whole picture of Intimate Partner Violence, it is no overstatement to say that every single second of every single day multiple men demean, insult, harass, beat, rape, and assault women or girls they know.

Because of the economic crisis in this country, battering has increased at the very same time that funding for crisis shelters has dried up. The GOP’s war on women and disingenuous and foolish campaign to slash federal money for all agencies that offer support, medical assistance, and psychological care for women (Planned Parenthood, WIC and Head Start are all under attack) will make the situation worse. This is not to say that poor people commit domestic violence at higher rates than the rich. Men of every station, race, income level, and education batter and abuse women with impunity in this country. The media, which makes billions of dollars portraying women in disturbingly demeaned and perverted roles, encourages this criminal abuse.

She was a German erotic actor who died in her sixth breast enlargement surgery, at the age of 23:

She went under the knife for the last time at the Alster Clinic and was having 800g (28oz) of silicon injected into each breast. But her heart stopped beating during the operation. She suffered brain damage and was put into an induced coma.The tabloid’s headline read: “The senseless death of Big Brother star Cora shocks the whole of Germany. “(Her) frail, 48kg (106lb) body struggled against death for 224 hours. She lost. Cora is dead. …Her previous five operations were reportedly done at a private clinic in Poland which refused to admit her for a sixth time.

I kept going over those weight numbers, the amount of silicone to be injected into her and her body weight. Then I started thinking about the widespread impact of heterosexual pron on what women’s breasts should look like and how we now regard artificial breasts as really the natural ones, how seeing a very thin woman with very large breasts on television now looks normal, in the sense of averages. Porn has also affected the shaving of the pubic hair.

If it has done all that, surely it must have had some impact on general interpretations of sexuality and on the roles women and men take in sex?

Women who are willing to alter their bodies dramatically are likely to engage in degrading and humiliating acts that do not sensually stimulate themselves, but, rather, their partners. Of course, being able to excite their partners would theoretically also get them off. Presumably, they would be more stimulated by partners who fit the roles that they have learned to find exciting–wealthy, powerful, dominant. These are the very men for whom they are mutating their bodies, after all, the men for whom they (think they) live, presumably.

Or would it be more accurate to say that these women live entirely in the Gaze, permanently disconnected from themselves as subjects, and utterly and only aware of themselves as objects?

I think that porn alters the mind and sexual experience because the culture has prepared the mind to alter. We are all subject to deep and long patterns of dominant-submissive behavior that are not at all “natural” in the sense of being permanent and unalterable.

In other words, it has not always been this way. We have been humanoid, Homo Sapiens, upright, intelligent, and communal, for approximately 100,000 years. Only about 10,000 years ago did human males begin to figure out how to dominate human females. Human females learned how to cope with that arbitrary and unnatural situation in various and often freakish ways.

Sexual desire is very malleable, easily manipulated–we know this.

But at what point does the subject who is experiencing sex as an object, and nothing but an object, utterly lose herself (or himself)? At what point does the long-objectified self break down completely, in severe depression, catastrophic phobias, or addictions, or bizarre, disfiguring and self-destructive behaviors?

Coralin Berger seems to have broken down in the last sort of way. We can imagine that she at one time had a sense of herself as a person, a girl, a young woman, before she became obsessed with her body, or, rather obsessed with the notion of herself as a body, a body that needed, in her eyes, continually to be improved.

We can speculate about the forces that influenced the way that she came to think of herself. They are the forces that influence all of us: the family, the church, the schools, the juridical system, the economy. There is also the increasing power of the media that manipulates our sense of ourselves as women, as men (for some good examples, check out About Face and the film Generation M). Each one of us resists these forces to the best of our abilities.

My question is: at what point do these forces drive us completely insane? At what point does the self who struggles to think independently break down so completely that there is nothing left but a shell, thin, brittle, and driven to the operating table for the sixth and final fix?

The mostly male members of the House and Senate managed to bring a little sanity to our insane health care system last night. With nearly all Republicans voting against health–which in my book amounts to the same thing as voting for death– the Democrats took a first and very timid step towards better health care for all Americans last night. But they caved into right-wing demagoguery and big-business interests anyway. When will they learn?

Here’s how this bill, if it is allowed to stand, will reduce the liberty of women in our country:

1. It will severely curtail women’s access to abortion. Employers and employees will now have to write two checks EVERY MONTH, one for health care, and another for an “abortion rider,” if they want to have coverage for abortion.

WHY THIS IS BAD: Before the bill, 85 per cent of insurance companies covered abortion without stigmatizing it. : it imposes new restrictions–burdens and cumbersome procedures–that will effectively limit women’s access to choose, which is exactly what the religious zealots and terrorists wanted all along.

2. It will effectively cement the power of the Hyde amendment, which is not an established part of the law, but rather a measure tacked on to the appropriations bill every year. Why? Because the President agreed to issue an executive order that will lend the weight of his office to the anti-abortion measures included in the bill.

WHY THIS IS BAD: It shows us that the guys in government are willing to trade away women’s rights to get what they want. The end does not justify the means. By strengthening the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion, this order weakens women’s constitutional right to choose to end unwanted or dangerous pregnancies.

3. It will allow insurance companies in the health exchanges to discriminate against women and the elderly, most of whom are women, to charge women and the elderly more for health care –if the pool of people to be covered is greater than 100.

WHY THIS IS BAD: It penalizes women for being female. In the case of elderly women, who are poorer because they’ve been discriminated against in the workplace for their entire lives, it redoubles the penalty against women for being female.

4. It imposes cruel and unreasonable limits on health care coverage for immigrants. Legal residents must wait a for five years to be eligible for Medicaid and other assistance, and undocumented workers cannot even use their own money to purchase health insurance through an exchange!

WHY THIS IS BAD: It’s racist and classist and backwards. We are a nation of immigrants, and every one of us deserves equal access to health care. And by the way–did you know that 25 per cent of all Black people in American immigrated to this country at the end of the 20th century? So this policy is going to hurt, badly, at least 25 per cent of Black women in our country today. That’s shameful!

A good end does not justify bad means. You can’t achieve justice for all by trading away the rights of some.

But WHY AM I STILL PISSED OFF? Because religious extremists and religious terrorists are steadily eroding our basic freedoms!!!

Women have a basic right to bodily integrity and subjectivity. By limiting our rights to the governance of our own bodies, by telling us that women do not have the ability or the freedom to choose what happens to their own bodies–a right they would never dare to take away from men–the lawmakers are attacking women’s fundamental rights to subjectivity, to personhood, to liberty.

I’m mad because these guys don’t care about my freedom, about my liberty–in fact they’ve shown me again and again that they’re perfectly happy to treat me as a less human than men, less entitled to basic freedoms than men.

Not enough Democrats and Pro-choice Republicans seem to be getting this message: Women’s basic liberties are falling under the monster-truck tires of the demagogues and the religious terrorists, who are determined to grind women into the mud.

These people are not just against health care, not just against abortion, they are against WOMEN. (And on Stupak’s resolute disregard for women, especially for Nuns, see Jodi Jacobson).

And yes, some of these extremists and terrorists are women, but that means nothing. Women have historically traded away their liberties in exchange for financial and emotional support from men–Women are not the only group of oppressed persons who believe what their oppressors tell them to believe, and who would rather take the lazy road of slavery than the hard road towards freedom.

Let’s all of us stop going along with the people who hate women. Let’s all of us get on that road to freedom.

As Amanda Marcotte explains in a recent “reality check” blog, the anti-choicers who want to deprive women of the right to make their own health-care decisions are people who want to force their own theological definitions and morals onto people who do not share their views. But many of these people are also terrorists who routinely harass, follow, stalk, and badger the healthworkers, their children and their families in order to enforce their woman-hating viewpoint. People who do this are rightly called terrorists, because terrorizing–and sometimes murdering–supporters of women’s rights, is their principal activity.

Since 1977 there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.

These theocratic bigots have terrrorized pro-choice advocates by setting fires, bombing, and sending anthrax through the mail. They have also murdered on number occasions (the following statistics are from wikipedia’s article on anti-abortion violence):

In the U.S., violence directed toward abortion providers has killed at least eight people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort.[5]

March 10, 1993: Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida was fatally shot during a protest. He had been the subject of wanted-style posters distributed by Operation Rescue in the summer of 1992. Michael F. Griffin was found guilty of Dr. Gunn’s murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

August 21, 1993 Dr. George Patterson, was shot and killed in Mobile, Alabama, but it is uncertain whether his death was the direct result of his profession or rather a robbery.[6][7]

July 29, 1994: Dr. John Britton and James Barrett, a clinic escort, were both shot to death outside of another facility in Pensacola. Rev.Paul Jennings Hill was charged with the killings. Hill received a death sentence and was executed September 3, 2003.

December 30, 1994: Two receptionists, Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were killed in two clinic attacks in Brookline, Massachusetts. John Salvi, who prior to his arrest was distributing pamphlets from Human Life International,[8] was arrested and confessed to the killings. He died in prison and guards found his body under his bed with a plastic garbage bag tied around his head. Salvi had also confessed to a non-lethal attack in Norfolk, Virginia days before the Brookline killings.

January 29, 1998: Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer who worked as a security guard at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, was killed when his workplace was bombed. Eric Robert Rudolph, who was also responsible for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, was charged with the crime and received two life sentences as a result.

October 23, 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot to death at his home in Amherst, New York. His was the last in a series of similar shootings against providers in Canada and northern New York state which were all likely committed by James Kopp. Kopp was convicted of Dr. Slepian’s murder after finally being apprehended in France in 2001.

May 31, 2009: Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed as he served as an usher at his church in Wichita, Kansas.[9]

We live in a country that has long prided itself for religious toleration.

It has always been very simple: against abortion? don’t have one. Leave the rest of us alone. And put the terrorists in jail.

Today, March 8, I am blogging in commemoration of International Women’s Day. The great German socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin is credited for having invented the memorial as part of her fight for women’s suffrage and for better working conditions for women and men everywhere. The socialist movement had always been an international campaign, part of a worldwide movement to resist the psychological, economic, and political damages inflicted by a capitalist economy in which every aspect of life is tied to the market. Zetkin and other socialist feminists around the world understood what so many of us have only lately come to understand, which is that when you let the bankers and the wealthiest corporations and employers do whatever they want, without any regulation whatsoever, things fall apart. And when things fall apart, women and children are the first to suffer and the last to recover.

It is worth remembering that while the first International Women’s Day celebrations, held in Germany, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland in 1911, were wildly successful (thousands of women turned out for meetings, and men were happy enough to acknowledge women’s many unpaid services to the family and the state as mothers, wives, and caretakers with gifts of flowers and cake) women did not win the right to vote in Switzerland until 1990. Danish women won full voting rights in 1915, Austrian and German women in 1918. Women in the United Arab Emirates still do not have full voting rights, which is an outrage. As we know from long and hard experience, even once women have won the right to elect government officials to office, they do not always vote in their interests. Many cultural factors work against them. These include widespread and deeply entrenched male-centered assumptions, and various forms of symbolic and real violence that prevent women from knowing and employing their true worth and power.

Attitudes that encouraged both sexes to regard women as inferior and relatively unimportant members of society led to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 148 workers, mostly women and girls, died because their employers had locked them into their work area. The tragedy, which became a centerpiece of American celebrations of International Women’s Day during the first part of the 20th century, exemplifies the ways in which gender discrimination and capitalism work together to oppress women.

Consider what is happening today, March 8, in India, where people take International Women’s Day far more seriously than they do in the United States. Two political parties are threatening the stability of the government because they refuse to support a bill that would ensure that one-third of the seats in Parliament be awarded to the group that makes up more than one-half of India’s population. Here’s a country where women have been voting since 1935, and where a woman (Indira Ghandi) was elected to the highest government seat of power in 1966, continues to thwart equal political rights for women. And yet long-ingrained scorn for women’s intellectual and governing abilities persist.

And what about here, at home, in the USA? Hollywood–one of the great bastions of sexist powers in the world–is currently reeling with self-congratulation and shock because it finally, finally, after 82 years, managed to grant an Oscar to a woman director, Kathryn Bigelow. Obviously, the problem was not that women haven’t been making great movies all this time, but rather that men–and some of the women voting–could not bring themselves to put the two words “woman” and “director” together. O, we’re perfectly comfortable letting women direct women–but in this country we have frighteningly tenacious antipathies to letting women do the things that directors do: oversee, govern, supervise, other men. Just think of the way that the same Americans who think they’re the most enlightened people on the planet brutally attacked Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. Consider William Kristol‘s not-funny joke about “white women,” which he thoughtlessly told right next to one, on Fox News. Think of the stupid Hillary nut-crackers, or the voodoo dolls which allegedly gave men the ability to power to “stick it to her” that they feared she was going to take away from them.

Mosquitos with bad attitudes like Kristol are, fortunately, not the greatest threat to international women’s freedom, to the dignity, political, social, and economic well-being of global women today. But corporations such as Fox News may be. As the internationally renowned gender theorist Raewyn Connell observes, “the corporation is the dominant form of economic organization and the key institution of developed capitalism,” and corporations have always been gendered institutions. Overwhelmingly owned, directed, and managed by men, corporations promote a gendered division of labor that relegates women to the lowest paid and least respected jobs. Even in countries where significant numbers of women have reached middle management, the so-called “glass ceiling” keeps women from positions of senior authority. Congress studied this problem in 1991 and found that, among the biggest corporations in this country, 97 per cent of senior managers were White, 95 to 97 per cent of them were male, and of the top 1000 companies only 2 had women CEOs. Linda Wirth, who examined the problem globally in 1997, states,

Almost universally, women have failed to reach leading positions in major corporations…irrespective of their abilities. Women generally fare best in industries employing large numbers of women, such as health and community services and the hotel and catering industry.

As in the global media, the international business community seems to be comfortable letting women direct women, but not other men. Chalk one up for Bigelow.

Transnational corporations work hand-in-hand with states, most of which are also dominated by men, and constitute the largest business organizations on the planet. They operate in global markets of capital, commodities, services, and labor, that are also strongly gender-structured. Recent feminist research shows that these markets, which are very weakly regulated, foster a misogynist and aggressive trading culture. This masculinist culture is often reinforced by the global media flooded with pornographic images of women as sex-crazed objects and servants of men’s desires. With few exceptions, sports programming also dishes out images of hyper-masculine, heteronormative, muscular machismo
.

While the new media, especially the World Wide Web, nurtures important sites of resistance, such as all the blogs participating in International Women’s Day, the trend that characterizes transnational corporations, the global market, and the global media does not bode well for gender equity. The research shows that we are increasingly bound together as women and men, as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered persons in this global marketplace. We therefore need, now more than ever, to revive the original call for justice in the workplace that Copenhagen International Women’s Conference and Clara Zetkin sounded in 1911.

Blogging, writing, acting out, fighting for justice in the workplace as well as in political venues, are all important activities that women are taking to fight this trend. As so many of you know, simply writing offers us a much needed outlet for our rage, our frustration, and our passion for justice. We have a long way to go, but go forward we will.